As far as I am aware, gnome 2 was losing maintainer focus. Certainly right now, it's hard to clearly find gnome 2/debian sid results on google - something that is important when things go wrong. XFCE is somewhat coarse but usable... if only it wasn't the only desktop that prevented my laptop from resuming from sleep. The tiling WMs I haven't installed, but when looking at their webpages don't seem to be traditional desktops - floating windows, ability to put thing on the desktop itself. The latter item is important to my workflow, and I can't understand the religious zeal with which people think that the desktop must be clear these days...
Right. Correction to my comment above: I meant to separate the tiling wm's out of "trad desktop" distinctions: I don't think the tiling wm is what most users think of when considering desktop UIs. Still, I from what I've seen wm's like awesome or xmonad do a good job of maximising screen real estate and make everything keyboard-centric, which saves a lot of time for developers.
XMonad is really great, provided you're willing to spend some time learning Haskell to configure it, which isn't a trivial task. It's in my book a very rewarding experience.
